'89 Nn Murders Total 19

None Linked To Drugs

December 27, 1989|By DAVID CHERNICKY Staff Writer

NEWPORT NEWS — The past year has proven to be an especially violent one in which city police counted 19 homicides through Dec. 20, the highest number of killings in a year since 1982, when there were 24 murders, according to police records.

As a supervisor of the Major Crimes Unit, which investigates violent crime, Sgt. H.E. Shockley said he was surprised that none of this year's murders were linked to illicit drugs, what with widespread publicity given drugs and violence nationwide.

In each of the 1989 cases, detectives have arrested and charged the people they believe committed the crimes, though in one of the cases the suspect was released after the Commonwealth's attorney dropped charges for insufficient evidence. One of the suspects was being held in a New York City jail awaiting extradition to Newport News, Shockley said.

"The Commonwealth nol prossed the charge. That is not to say the charge won't be reinstituted," Shockley said, referring to the July 2 shooting death of Donnel L. Roberts. Roberts was killed in a drive-by shooting at 41st Street and Jefferson Avenue.

Detectives later arrested Robert Saab and charged him in the slaying. Though the charges were not prosecuted and Saab was released, police officials are still showing the case as solved.

Of the 23 people detectives arrested in connection with 18 of the killings (the other was shot and killed by an on-duty police officer), four of the suspects were under 18 years of age.

Two of three teen-age boys convicted of killing cab driver Robert Vann, 54, were minors. Vann died Jan. 19 from a shotgun blast in his back. The third suspect was 18 years old. All three suspects were tried as adults.

Shockley also noted that one of the two boys accused of brutally beating to death 75-year-old Frank Brooks outside his Marshall Avenue home in June was a 16-year-old. The suspect has been certified as an adult and his trial is pending. The second suspect was 18 years old at the time.

Of the 12 months this year, June was the bloodiest.

"We had four murders in a span of 13 days," Shockley said. A teen-age boy was stabbed to death in the 2400 block of Madison Avenue during a dispute with a man who was pestering the boy's mother, police said.

Eight days later, a construction worker discovered a man's body in woods off Industrial Park Drive off Jefferson Avenue.

The trail took detectives to North Carolina, where Thomas D. Hart's van was recovered, then to New Hampshire where the victim's estranged wife and a 17-year-old companion confessed to the murder.

Shockley said firearms were used in eight of the 19 killings, while knives were the murder instrument in seven cases.

In almost every one of the 1989 crimes, the victim and suspect either were related or knew one another socially or casually.

"We've had very few stranger-to-stranger killings over the past two years," Shockley said. Generally, those crimes in which the victim and suspect are known to each other are easier to solve.

Shockley declined to speculate at the cause or guess a reason for the rise in homicides this year, compared to the 14 victims in 1988. "You just can't predict human behavior from one year to the next. Next year we may have only five, then again we may have 50."